1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system, and in particular to a method and apparatus for managing a network computing system. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for retaining configuration and management information for a network computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
In a System Area Network (SAN), the hardware provides a message passing mechanism which can be used for Input/Output devices (I/O) and interprocess communications between general computing nodes (IPC). Processes executing on devices access SAN message passing hardware by posting send/receive messages to send/receive work queues on a SAN channel adapter (CA). These processes also are referred to as “consumers”. The send/receive work queues (WQ) are assigned to a consumer as a queue pair (QP). The messages can be sent over five different transport types: Reliable Connected (RC), Reliable datagram (RD), Unreliable Connected (UC), Unreliable Datagram (UD), and Raw Datagram (RawD). Consumers retrieve the results of these messages from a completion queue (CQ) through SAN send and receive work completions (WC). The source channel adapter takes care of segmenting outbound messages and sending them to the destination. The destination channel adapter takes care of reassembling inbound messages and placing them in the memory space designated by the destination's consumer. Two channel adapter types are present, a host channel adapter (HCA) and a target channel adapter (TCA). The host channel adapter is used by general purpose computing nodes to access the SAN fabric. Consumers use SAN verbs to access host channel adapter functions. The software that interprets verbs and directly accesses the channel adapter is known as the channel interface (CI).
Within a SAN, the different consumers execute on nodes or devices within a node. For example, a node may be a host channel processor or a switch, while a device may be a channel adapter within a host channel processor. In managing the SAN, different nodes may be turned on and off at different times. Additionally, in some cases all of the nodes within the SAN may be powered on at the same time. In powering on nodes, the nodes are initialized and nodes within the SAN are discovered. In this situation, large initialization or boot times may occur, which results in lost time and possibly frustration to a user of the SAN.
In addition, after initialization, a customer may change the assignments made automatically by the subnet manager. Changes that a customer may want to make include: creation of multiple partitions, ports participating in a specific partition, and service levels that can be used by a given port. Without the ability to retain these manual changes, after each initialization the customer would have to redo all the assignments he had previously made.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus for increasing the speed at which configuration of nodes occur during initialization of the nodes, as well as maintaining manual configuration changes made by the customer.